


Royal Flush

by everchangingmuse



Category: Ever After High
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:13:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2808704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everchangingmuse/pseuds/everchangingmuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lizzie Hearts has a secret.  Two secrets, both of which pull her heart in different directions.  An impromptu mini-mad tea party thrown by her Wonderlandian friends helps her to sort herself out.  After all, how can she one day be the Queen of Hearts if she can't rule her own?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Royal Flush

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kafuka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafuka/gifts).



Lizzie Hearts waved to Daring Charming as he slipped gallantly away from the tower that housed the girls’ dorm rooms at Ever After High. She kept the small smile on her face until he (and his blindingly-white teeth) were out of sight. Once she was certain he was gone, she sighed, her smile bowing upside-down, and crossed her arms as she leaned back against the smooth stone.

“Off with his head,” she muttered.

This was the dozenth ‘date’ Daring had taken her on. Always in secret. And she enjoyed them. Really, she did. Every ‘date’ was an exciting adventure, a time when Lizzie could relax, forget her royally fierce manners, and be herself, not the future Queen of Hearts. Their ‘dates’ were fun. Just...just fun.

Another sigh escaped her upside-down smile. That’s all they were. The way Cupid talked about dates (not that Lizzie had talked to Cupid about dates - she’d just been in the library when Cupid was talking to other people), she should feel mimsy and wonderish, warble-kneed and heart-fluttery. Lizzie felt none of these things with Daring. She felt...friendish, which was something of a wonder in and of itself. Her mother’s cards had warned against making friends or feeling friendish - especially toward boys. But friendish was how she felt, like she did toward her fellow refugees from Wonderland. The only person she felt anything like mimsy or heart-fluttery around was….

“Someone’s been sneakier than me.”

Lizzie wanted to act as startled as she felt, but to do so would be unQueenly. Queens are never startled, according to her mother. Instead, she narrowed her eyes and turned toward the sound. A wide grin and glowing eyes met her view. “Must you act like such a knave, Kitty?” she grumped.

The rest of Kitty materialized, starting at the tips of her boots and ending with her sharp nose. The daughter of the Cheshire Cat gave another of the family’s famous grins. “How purr-fectly rebellious of you, Lizzie,” she continued as she sidled up close. “Sneaking around with Apple White’s destined prince? Are you going to follow the twisty-turny road Ashlynn Ella is following now?”

Lizzie stamped her foot and met Kitty nose to nose. “Do **_not_** compare your future Queen to a Fairytale princess!” she whisper-shouted. She wanted to blush, but blushing was also unQueenly - so she blustered instead.

Kitty giggled, which only made Lizzie want to shout more, but that would really let the dormouse out of the teapot.

“Did someone mention tea?”

Both girls blinked, their argument momentarily forgotten, as Madeline Hatter popped out of a nearby rosebush - a white rosebush, Lizzie noted with a scowl.

“No….” Lizzie and Kitty spoke in unison, like a thing with two heads.

Maddie shrugged. “I could have sworn someone mentioned tea. Maybe the narrator, then.” She giggled as Lizzie wondered what in Wonderland the Hatter’s daughter meant. “Oh, well. Mentioned or not, I happen to have a hot kettle ready. Anyone?” Seemingly from nowhere, Maddie produced a wrought iron table with a glass top (tablecloth under the glass to prevent stains from spills), three perfectly mismatched chairs, and a steaming pot of tea.

Kitty and Lizzie exchanged glances, shrugged, and sat. Lizzie took a chair that resembled a throne and reminded her of her mother’s throne at home in Card Castle. Maddie set a cup and saucer printed with playing cards in front of her, causing her to almost smile. Maddie’s pet mouse, Earl Grey, dropped a suit’s worth of sugar cubes into the cup just before Maddie poured the tea.

“Everything makes Wonderland-sense with the right tea,” Maddie said, finally sitting herself. Her chair had three differently-shaped legs and probably should have toppled over, but it was Wonderlandian and proper, so it did as it should and balanced itself so the girl could sit.

Kitty, whose tea looked more like warm milk, leaned forward, staring at Lizzie expectantly, another trademarked Cheshire grin on her face. “Well?”

“Well what?” Lizzie asked. She tried not to look shifty-eyed, and took a small sip of her tea.

“Wishing well!” Maddie giggled.

Wishing well indeed, Lizzie thought. She wished many things were well - Wonderland, obviously, her piece of mind, her troubled heart. The future Queen of Hearts should not have such a troubled one herself! If she couldn’t control her own heart, how could she control others’ later, when she was truly Queen?

“Do you wish the Charming One well?” Kitty asked coyly.

“Not as well as you imply,” Lizzie huffed. “Friendish, nothing more.”

“Then why be all stealthy-sneaky?” Kitty pressed.

“Because it’s fun!” Maddie said, taking a satisfied sip of her tea. “And because no one else would understand. They’d jump to conclusions, like a bandersnatch on a mushroom.”

Lizzie nodded once, amazed that Maddie had figured her out so quickly. Then again, she was best friends forever after with Raven Queen, who seemed the most unsensical girl ever, and Maddie was able to make non-unsense of her. And, she probably overheard lots of heartfelt conversations when working in her father’s tea shoppe. It was a strange day indeed when the future Mad Hatter made the most sense.

“Well, if you don’t wish the Charming One well, whom do you wish well? No one ever sighs the way you sighed unless there’s someone holding the key to their heart whom they wish well.” Kitty nodded sagely and lapped at her milk tea.

“Off with your head!” Lizzie grumped. Again, her friendish future subjects were far more sensical than she gave them credit for. Even as she grumped and blustered, she saw in her mind’s eye a warm smile and heard a rich sugary giggle, which almost made her bluster a blushter.

“It’s not the Crown,” Kitty said, ticking people off on her fingers. “Nor the Frog, nor the Sparrow.” All three girls shuddered at that idea. “Nor the Hunter.” Kitty looked up. “The Less Charming?”

Maddie shook her head firmly. “None of them for the future queen. The boys just don’t stack up.”

Lizzie raised an eyebrow. Interesting way of phrasing things. Kitty must have thought so, too. She giggled and half disappeared. “I know who,” she said-sang.

“Ooh, ooh, can we play a guessing game?” Maddie asked, bouncing in her chair.

“No! We cannot!” Lizzie whisper-shouted. She took a huffy sip of her tea.

We could. It’s not impossible.”

“I say it’s impossible,” Lizzie snapped.

“What? Playing a game or admitting your crush?” Kitty teased.

“Both!”

The table fell silent at Lizzie’s whispered outburst. Lizzie felt her lips part as if of their own accord, her eyes go wide. Had she just…? She glanced left at Kitty, right at Maddie. Equally wide eyes and agape mouths greeted her. She blinked, then shook her head. She had.

“Oh, off with your heads.” The words were mostly whispered, full of reproach not at her fellow Wonderlandians, but at herself. She spoke mostly to her tea, since that was where her gaze had landed when she dropped it. What sort of Queen - what sort of girl - yelled so horribly at her subjects - her...her friends? She wasn’t angry at them. She was discombobulated, flustered. If it were Kitty, or Maddie with a secret this secretive, wouldn’t she be teasing them in her own way? Wouldn’t she be curious? Of course she would.

She felt a hand on her right shoulder and looked up to find Maddie smiling carefully at her. No hard feelings, only soft ones. Lizzie gave a little smile in return.

“Are you going to tell her?”

Both Maddie and Lizzie turned to the Cheshire’s daughter. Even Kitty was subdued, casually smoothing out the fur on her cuffs, as if Lizzie hadn’t just whisper-shouted at her best friend for no good reason.

Lizzie felt something like a laugh, but far more cruel and sad, bubble up in her chest. She held still a moment, until the urge to laugh it passed. It wasn’t the sort of laugh that would help right now. “How can I?” she asked after a long moment and a longer sip of tea. “I’m going to be Queen of Wonderland.”

“Going to be,” Maddie said. “You aren’t a Queen yet.”

“And anyway, a Queen can do as she pleases,” Kitty added. She looked up and into Lizzie’s eyes. “Would telling her make you not want to be Queen?”

Lizzie shook her head. The other girls were being sensical again. She’d worry they were being too sensical, except it was currently working in her favor. She would be the next Queen of Hearts. She knew that and believed it down to her bones. She was proud of her destiny, of following in her mother’s dainty stomping footsteps. But that shouldn’t stop her from pursuing her own heart’s desire now. Really, wasn’t that what a some-day Queen of Hearts **_should_** do? Following her heart wouldn’t interfere with her story - not unless and until the way to Wonderland was reopened. It would be better than having pretend fairytale ‘dates’ with Daring, where being noticed by the wrong person had the potential to ruin destinies, especially if Apple or Daring ever thought she was romantically serious. Where was the downside in her subjects’ advice?

Oh. Right. Her own nerves. The ones she never admitted to having, except perhaps to the girls sitting with her, and only under extreme circumstances. Well, this was certainly an extreme circumstance, wasn’t it? And they were alone. Not another character in sight. Lizzie looked at each of the girls with wider than normal eyes. “White roses?” she asked.

Maddie laughed. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard more ridiculous things than just about anyone.”

Kitty cast a shifty glance at Maddie. “You speak Riddlish as well as we do, and yet you’re covered in mist, Madeline. She means, what if she rejects the romantical feelings, and only wants to be friendish.” Kitty turned to Lizzie, speaking in the language of Ever After, as if to make certain Maddie didn’t misinterpret, which was indeed odd for the Hatter’s daughter. “If that’s the case, you stay friendish, and your feelings stay secret.”

“And if she doesn’t want to stay friendish?” Lizzie shook her head and closed her eyes, scrunching them tight. She felt a pain in her chest at the very idea. “She can’t tell a lie, not even to be kind. If she rejects me….”

“She won’t.” Maddie folded her arms and nodded, looking more serious than Lizzie had ever seen her. “We can see what you don’t see.”

“And what we see is our Queen being ridiculous and unsensical over nothing.” Kitty disappeared and reappeared behind Lizzie, pulling her chair out from under her without warning. Lizzie would have fallen onto the grass if it weren’t for her Queenly training from her mother. She managed to stand before she could lose her balance. “And if our Queen is being unsensical, as opposed to nonsensical, we have to help her.”

“Exactly.” Maddie nodded again.

Lizzie sighed, but she let the joy bubbling inside her spill through just a little. She gave them both a larger than tiny smile and lifted her chin. “Well, I do not want a reputation of being unsensical. It wouldn’t do for the future Queen of Hearts to be considered unsensical.”

Maddie giggled, and Kitty’s grin widened. Lizzie felt her own mouth stretching a little further, and it was with the warmest feeling that she told them both, “Off with your heads.”

***

A week passed before Lizzie was able to see the one who made her heart feel tingly and mimsy alone. She’d been so busy with classes, and croquet, and gently but firmly explaining to Daring that they could be friendish, but not so friendish as they’d been, that she hadn’t really had time to devote to figuring out how to woo someone herself. She’d shadowed Cupid discreetly - as discreetly as Lizzie could shadow anyone - to try and gain some more tips about dating and love. She’d paid closer attention to the fledgling couples at the school, and the unrequited crushes, which Maddie and Kitty pointed out with great delight. None of what she saw or heard felt quite right to her, though. She wasn’t sure how to approach another girl, especially not one with whom she was friendish.

A stubborn hedgehog ended up being her opportunity for one on one time with the girl in question. It hadn’t wanted to play croquet, which was most unlike it, and had gone all prickly-ball on her when she’d set it down to hit it with her flamingo. It took her a good two or three hard whacks before she could budge it from its spot, and then it went sailing high into the air, away from the game and toward the woods. With a frustrated sigh, she stomped after it, telling the others to play on without her for the moment. She was so busy scanning the ground and the underbrush that she didn’t notice the object of her affections until she bumped, quite literally, into her.

“Did you lose something, Lizzie?” Cedar Wood asked, stumbling backward at the contact. Lizzie herself stumbled, but managed to keep from falling forward onto her face, which would not only have been unQueenly, but embarrassing. As it was, she felt like blushtering.

“My hedgehog,” she said, suddenly finding herself tongue-tied. Even more so when she looked up, and saw the tiny paws of the hedgehog in question sticking out of Cedar’s dark curly hair, just behind her cricket barrette. “It wasn’t playing nicely today.”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t seen it,” Cedar said. “I’ve been out sketching today. I think a pinecone just fell on my head, though.”

Lizzie stifled a giggle. “It isn’t a pinecone, it’s my hedgehog.”

Cedar raised her eyes, as if she were trying to see it for herself, and then lifted her wooden hand up to her hair. “I’d say ouch, but I can’t really feel pain, though I think I’d be in pain if I could feel it. It’s stuck to my scalp, and it just bit my finger.”

Lizzie glared at the hedgehog. “Will you behave!” she grumped at it. “Acting in such a manner won’t do at all. Hold still.” The last, she directed at Cedar, and softened her voice accordingly. “I’ll get him.”

“What if he tries to bite you, too?” Cedar asked, sounding genuinely worried.

A heart flutter gave Lizzie the briefest pause. “He knows better. And if he doesn’t, off with his head.” She gave Cedar a tiny smile, so the other girl would know she was joking about the last part. Though of all the girls in Book End, Cedar was the only non-Wonderlandian to understand about the different shades of meaning that phrase carried. She stepped closer to the other girl so she could reach up and detangle the hedgehog without destroying Cedar’s hairdo. Close enough to smell the fresh wood scent the other girl always carried like perfume, and close enough that her wide frilled collar brushed against Cedar’s shoulder. 

There was probably a better angle for extracting a hedgehog from the top of someone’s head, but there certainly wasn’t a better angle for being this close to someone who made your heart swell and flutter. If Cedar raised her arms, they’d encircle Lizzie’s waist. Lizzie’s lips were right by Cedar’s perfectly carved ear. Gently, ever so gently, she separated hair from hedgehog and pulled him free of Cedar’s wooden scalp.

“I think this would tickle, if I were a real girl,” Cedar said.

“It would more than tickle,” Lizzie told her. She pulled the hedgehog down and cradled it in her arms a moment before holding it up between them. “Apologize to her for your behavior.”

The hedgehog made hedgehog sounds, and Cedar smiled. “Apology accepted. Thank you, Lizzie.”

Lizzie felt like blushtering again. She was surprised Cedar couldn’t hear her heart, for how loud it sounded to her own ears. “I….” She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t figure out how to begin. Feeling the lightness in her heart fade, she took a step back, out of the bubble of space that was their shared space, and knelt to set the hedgehog down. “Back to the game with you,” she told it. “And no more tricksy behavior, understood? That was very, very rude.”

The hedgehog skittered off as Lizzie stood up again, finding herself face to face with a smiling Cedar. Only then did she notice the sketchbook in the girl’s hand. “Show me,” she said, pointing at the sketchbook. “You said you were drawing the forest. I’d like to see.”

Cedar’s eyes went wide. “I only just started drawing the forest, and really, it isn’t a very good rendering because I’ve been sort of distracted lately, and I have lots of sketches in here that aren’t the forest, so I could really only show you the one picture.” She took a step backwards.

For a split second, Lizzie thought she saw a grinning mouth down near Cedar’s shoes. It was gone in an instant, the same instant that Cedar tripped over a branch that Lizzie was positive hadn’t been there a moment before. Cedar gave a startled cry as she fell backwards and landed on her rear end, her sketchbook flying from her hands and falling open to a random page.

Lizzie had started forward to help her up when she noticed the sketchbook. She heard Cedar talking about how glad she was at that moment that she wasn’t really a girl, because she knew that fall would have hurt her tailbone if she’d had one, but it was just background buzz, like a bee passing her ear. Lizzie’s attention was focused on the book. On the sketch in the corner of the page she could see, to be precise, and Lizzie was nothing if not precise. It was small, and half finished. An eye, colored in pastels in a piercing blue, with the sketchy lines of a red heart surrounding it. She lifted her hand, letting her fingertips hover over the makeup heart she’d painted on her face that morning, as she did every morning.

“...and then I’d be in real trouble, because it would take ages for….” Cedar trailed off, presumably because she’d noticed Lizzie’s reaction and focus on the sketchbook. “Oh. Oh fairy godmother, that is just the reason I didn’t want to show you my drawings.”

“Why?” Lizzie asked, her heart hammering. 

Cedar glanced away, then back to the book, then to Lizzie. “Because if you saw them, you might wonder why I’d drawn certain pictures.”

“I might,” Lizzie agreed. She thought back to the advice she’d given Cedar at the start of the year - _paint the roses red_ , she’d said. It was time to take her own advice. “I might also ask if you’d like to have tea with me.” Cedar’s eyes widened.

“You don’t just mean have tea, do you.” It wasn’t a question.

Lizzie shook her head. “I don’t. I...I’d like to take you out. For a date.” The words came out in a rush, and this time, Lizzie couldn’t help the heat rising to her cheeks. For all her mother thought blushing was unQueenly, Lizzie’s cheeks defied orders and turned pink.

“For a date,” Cedar echoed. Then, she fell silent, regarding Lizzie with an expression the future Queen couldn’t read. She stared for so long that Lizzie began to feel that she might do better to play it off as a prank and storm off back to the croquet, leaving the shattered fragments of her heart to bury later in secret. Then, without warning, Cedar smiled. A large, bright, happy smile that made Lizzie feel wobbly-kneed and mimsy. “I’d like that. I’d like that very much, actually. I didn’t think you’d ever think of me as someone you’d want to go on a date with. I always thought that you would find a handsome prince-to-be and I’d have to start avoiding you so I wouldn’t accidentally say anything that would-”

The future Queen of Hearts stopped the stream of truth with a kiss that surprised and delighted both of them equally. As they broke apart, Lizzie was certain she heard giggling from a nearby bush, and thought she saw a bright cat’s eye winking at her from a nearby tree.

**Author's Note:**

> The story incorporates elements of royal diaries, charming webisodes, and rebellious novels. I hope it isn't too unsensical!
> 
> Thank you to palmedfire for being a Wonderlandiful beta reader!


End file.
